Our love-hate relationship with Facebook Ads

Here at Stryve, Facebook ads often have their place in our client strategies.  We use them because, for certain brands with the right audience, they just make a lot of sense. When done properly, Facebook ads can drive huge results and that’s what we love about them.

On the other hand, they sometimes drive huge headaches.  I have a few bones to pick with Facebook Ads, and a few tips to help you navigate the process.

The Approval Process

If you are planning to run an ad that is timely (i.e. your week-long promotion starts on Friday or your event takes place next Wednesday) I can’t stress this enough: Plan for delays. According to Facebook, your ad will be reviewed and approved/disapproved within 24 hours.  In our experience, this period of time has ranged from as little as 4 minutes to as long as 4 days and it is completely unpredictable.  Like I said, this is especially important if you are running timely ads since you want to maximize exposure in the days leading up to your promotion.

Tip: Post the ad 2 days before you originally planned for it to go live.  If it gets approved right away and you don’t want to be spending ad budget just yet, simply pause it until you’re ready to go.

The Random Disapproval Process

Your ad was approved, it has started cycling, people are clicking, liking, commenting, sharing, and all is well with the world — until your ad gets disapproved out of nowhere. It’s important to watch for this because you don’t want to risk losing too much momentum when it gets halted and you have to figure out what went wrong, rework the creative, get the revised ad up, and go through the approval process all over again.  Luckily for us, our awesome designer Dave is always standing by to deal with our Facebook ad emergencies.

Tip #1: Check out the Facebook ad guidelines and make sure that your ad copy and image conservatively meet all of their standards and restrictions before you post them.  When I say conservatively, I mean for example, when they say images cannot be comprised of more than 20% text, make sure they aren’t comprised of more than 5% text.  I believe you – your image is only 8% text – but if you try to plead your case nobody at Facebook is listening.

Tip #2: Have a Dave standing by. (You can’t have ours!)

Nobody is Listening

Usually, when you pay for any type of service and reach out for assistance from the vendor, they are more than happy to help and work with you to resolve the issue… unless you’re Facebook or a Canadian cell phone provider.  But at least with your cell phone provider you can 1) call them and 2) say the magic word (“switching”) and you can generally come to some sort of resolution. Have a problem with your Facebook ads? Tough luck.  There is no phone number, no live chat support, no email address, and there are definitely no magic words.

Tip: If you do enough digging you might be able to find a feedback form to submit, but don’t hold your breath. We’re still waiting on a response from one we submitted back in November.